The movie is described on the box at Blockbuster as "Big Chill for the 90's," but I rented it despite that hokey comparison. In some ways it's true. While the successful white urban middle class adults sat around during most of The Big Chill reflecting on their pasts with variable safety, the people in Grand Canyon mired in the violence and fear of their present, but the effect was the same. We all stand to learn a lot from just paying attention to the things going on right around us.

Helicopters. They pass over in a lot of scenes throughout the movie, letting us know as well as the characters that while we may be able to improve the quality of our lives in spaces, we are never fully safe from the world's woes and threats to our happiness, and while that fact may be disconcerting, it is almost just as comforting.

Loving people means being very, very vulnerable. There are costs. The mother hovering over her little girl on the floor of her home during a drive by shooting cries with an open gaping mouth. It's not supposed to be a pretty scene, her mouth wide, framed with tears. The secretary who's in love with her married boss, driving around the city, crying at her unrequited love only to be victim to some runaway nut who breaks her car window at a stoplight. Her hair is frizzy and her face unwashed, for a reason. The wife who finds an abandoned child and dresses it in her teenage son's old baby clothes, sunning the infant by the pool of her upscale home: she was meant to have nightmares about losing that baby, about losing the right to love it when no one would. I realized, in all these scenes, how alone I think I want to be just so I could avoid being this vulnerable. But I'm not. I never was.

Yes, the world is fucked up. And we don't make contact like this enough. We seldom reach past the point of common kindness and really get mixed up in each other's lives. We so easily trade being human for human comfort. I do it. So do you. Sometimes, we need to be reminded, and so we are, in ways as trite as these.

The movie takes advantage of my TV's poor color quality. It washes out the outdated clothing, hairstyles, and cars. It reminds me that Los Angeles in 1991 was not that long ago. We'd like to think we're moving forward because we are in some ways. But in others, we're centuries old. We're a breath on the face of a timeless attraction site. And yet, we mean the world.